Monday, November 02, 2009

Jacob Weisberg has taken on a difficult target in an essay in Slate: the Prohibition. "When the 18th Amendment went into effect in 1920, it was a radical social experiment challenging a custom as old as civilization....Today prohibition is a byword for futile attempts to legislate morality and remake human nature." Pretty bravely contrarian there, Jacob! So the Prohibition was a "gross insult to individual rights" and a "predictable failure," huh? Well, that's too big a target for a communitarian like myself to pass up.

Of course, Weisberg isn't really attacking the Prohibition, and I'm not really going to defend it. (Though--as one who thought highly of the years we lived in a dry county in Arkansas--I would argue that he passes over the actual historical record of the Prohibition much too casually; see here for some links to discussions over the larger and multifaceted questions of to what degree and in what way Prohibition really did "work.") What he's attacking is the notion of prohibition--technically, I suppose, the idea of prohibiting anything, really, when said prohibitions "fail to keep pace with a liberalizing society"--and what I'm defending is the opposite. Or, at least, I would claim that certain kinds of prohibitions--including but not limited to sumptuary laws of various kinds--are a lot less easy to discredit than Weisberg apparently believes.

His chosen targets are "laws that prevent gay marriage, restrict cannabis as a Schedule I Controlled Substance, and ban travel to Cuba." But he doesn't actually attack the substance of any of those laws; rather, he sees them all as fading into irrelevance in the face of "the evolving definition of the pursuit of happiness." In issue after issue, Weisberg claims, "popular demand for an individual right"--to marry whomever you love, regardless of gender; to smoke a mostly harmless and sometimes medically beneficial recreational drug; to travel and do business in an island 90 miles from Florida--"is simply too powerful to overcome." He does allow that there may likely be some qualifications and variability in marginal cases, but overall is message is that prohibition, as an idea, is over, and that Democrats and Republicans alike (with their concerns about guns and abortion, for example) need to get out of the way.

Since he's not attacking these laws, I don't see a need to defend them. (For the record, though: marijuana doesn't strike me as any more dangerously addictive and potentially harmful than such legal-yet-restricted products as, say, alcohol and tobacco; the embargo on Cuba has been pretty pointless from the start; and my complicated feelings about same-sex marriage are something I've talked about more than enough already.) But his overall argument against prohibition in general has a couple of huge holes in it, and I might as well point them out.

Towards the end of his piece, Weisberg confidently places technology on the side of the liberationists: "In a world where everyone has his own printing press, restrictions on private behavior become increasingly untenable." But that is simply false--or at least, simplistic to the point of meaninglessness. One can just as easily argue the reverse: that in the age of the internet, we have become increasing obsessed with what our neighbors are doing, with who is moving in next door to us, with who said what about who; cyberbullying, Megan's Law, hate crime's legislation and more are all expressions of at least partially internet-empowered popular demands for our individual "private behavior" to be subject to public scrutiny and possible sanction. Apples and oranges, you say? Perhaps. Weisberg's examples of information running free and, by being so available, consequently affecting how people judge what is "normal," what they can co-exist alongside with without finding their own choices and ways of life threatened, make sense. But they aren't the whole story, of course; as my above examples suggest, the proliferation of information can just as easily generate paranoia, suspicion, and overreactions in the form of laws which erect prohibitions, rather than tear them down. All of which leads to a deeper point which Weisberg doesn't reckon with (but should).

Exactly how does our "definition of the pursuit of happiness" evolve, anyhow? It doesn't happen on one's own. It happens through time and space, through communities and history, through one's awareness of and involvement with others, past and present and future. Weisberg would obviously agree with this; otherwise, his claim that the internet alone--the raw force of all these options and lifestyles and possibilities, displayed at the touch of a button--contributes to making prohibitions laughable wouldn't make sense. But if so, doesn't it make just as much sense that communities can take control of their own development, emphasize certain portions of the past and project intentions into the future, and by so doing contribute to how the members of said communities define the pursuit of happiness? Of course it does--that's called "culture" (or "popular sovereignty," or "participatory democracy"; take your pick), and I find it hard to believe that Weisberg would dispute that either. Which means that the "popular demand for an individual right" isn't necessarily the death-knell for the prohibitionary or sumptuary mindset. He calls prohibition today more about "omission than commission"--meaning, I suppose, that he sees certain policies today (regarding gay marriage, or marijuana, or Cuba) as showing a misguided reluctance to admit the inevitable. But to call the failure of any individual prohibition inevitable is to assume that the individual is the only and the sovereign actor in each and every case, and that's not true. Individuals are in part made from their environments, and collective environments can be controlled. Any such control will be, of course, either welcomed or resisted by particular individuals, and off we go to the complicated realities of political life. But those complications won't ever wither away, I think. There's a tension between the individual and the community, between choice and culture, that's as old as modernity, if not much older. Weisberg's "big idea," by contrast, is just a quick and superficial political judgment about the current state of play in the United States about something much bigger than the country itself.

Of course, Weisberg may well be right about the three specific prohibitions he mentions. As I said above, I won't waste any pixels defending any of them in particular. But I do defend prohibition. Not all or any prohibitions, but some. America's experiment with a federal prohibition on alcohol--expressed through various laws and, ultimately, the 18th amendment--was ultimately flawed, I suspect, because it was too big: it allowed the passions of some parts of the population (including such strange bedfellows as Methodists, Southern Baptists, Progressives, feminists, and radicals from the South and Great Plains) to claim a moral consensus over everyone else (Roman Catholics, German Lutherans, immigrants from all parts of Southern and Eastern Europe, ordinary folk from big cities across the nation), and enforce that consensus accordingly. The harms that came from such a huge operation, whatever its arguable benefits, were many. By contrast, as I mentioned above, our old residence of Craighead County, Arkansas, had its own alcohol prohibition in place, and while the controversies continue--and why wouldn't they? it's a free country, after all--it seems that the community has survived it's collective decision to ban alcohol relatively well. At least, the folks who live there continue to value that kind of popular sovereignty, and it hasn't exactly led to a rush of political unrest, violence, and organized crime. So maybe it just depends on how any given prohibition is set up, and how many people, with all personal desires as well as their identification with and their aspirations for the community in which they live, can be fairly said such a prohibition might include.

Which is all just a long-winded way of saying that any democratic decisions, whether prohibitionary or otherwise, really must begin with figuring out what the borders of the relevant community are, so as to enable the people--the demos--so included to speak. Figuring out which prohibitions and which rights really are the business of the national government (and, despite my occasional localist sympathies, I acknowledge that many are), and which are best handled by the states, or counties, or cities, all the way down, is complex matter, for which there probably can never be any simple solution. But knocking aside the whole matter of prohibition as something on its way out, Weisberg does, because "the pursuit of happiness" has spoken, doesn't respect that complexity at all.

1 comment:

Weisberg's technology point really is pretty incoherent, but I think it might be better reconstructed as an attack on the possibility of, as you say, "figuring out what the borders of the relevant community are, so as to enable the people--the demos--so included to speak." And, on an important level, he's right in the sense that our mechanisms for figuring out relevant borders are pretty much all deeply flawed, and the techno-socio-cultural conditions of post-modern life (or whatever) expose and exacerbate that reality.

And I'd agree with all that. But I'd also agree with you that setting those borders is simply unavoidable for democracy*, and he's nowhere near providing an argument against that rather basic point. What's odd is that his examples of prohibition (bad ideas all, to be sure) are of a pretty limited scope, but his actual conception of prohibition is pretty radically expansive, and would take him to places I'm quite certain he wouldn't be willing to go.

*of course, democracy also requires contesting how the borders have been drawn, as our border-drawing capabilities are flawed. That communitarians often ignore, elide, or discount this crucial aspect of democracy could have been a point for Weisberg, if he'd made a better and more serious argument.

(PS: I had a dream last night about writing an huge, epic, point-by-point response to your Prop. 8 post from last year. I was consumed by the task and ignoring any number of obligations and deadlines to complete it.)

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."